Question: How can I address my employee’s bad attitude?

Can you share some tips about managing folks with attitude/professionalism problems?

I have to meet with a staff member this week who is generally good at her job but has become increasingly disrespectful and resistant to any direction. It came to head over an inappropriate email that was disrespectful/borderline insubordinate. Her attitude makes it difficult for me to work with her, but every time I talk to her about anything she is so unpleasant about it, and afterwards it is almost the silent treatment.

Do you have suggestions for the manager to address the attitude without making the whole situation even more unpleasant? She wants quite desperately to be transferred to work anywhere but here, but doesn’t realize that her attitude is going to make that impossible. So I plan to make that clear in the meeting, but she is still griping about the time I told her they’d come up with a new procedure they wanted us to follow that was different from what she did.

I know I can’t make her respect me, but is there a way that discussing disrespectful attitude will result in better attitude and not just make the problem worse?

Answer:

Managers sometimes worry that they can’t address attitude issues as straightforwardly as they would performance issues, but you can and you should. In fact, you should frame it exactly the the same way you would a performance issue — “what you’re doing is ___, and what I need is ___.”

Just make sure that you’re specific about what she’s doing that needs to change (as opposed to just lumping it all under “bad attitude”). For instance: “Part of what we need in this role is someone with a cheerful, can-do attitude and a willingness to hear feedback. That means I need you to be pleasant to coworkers, participate in meetings, not roll your eyes or otherwise be dismissive when people talk, and be open to discussing areas where I ask you to do something differently.”

And if the problem is severe enough that it could conceivably lead you to replace the person without significant improvement, you should be transparent about that: “I want to be clear that this is important enough that without significant improvement in the next few weeks, we would need to move you out of this role.”

Alison Green writes about workplace and management issues for The Business Journals. She writes the "Ask a Manager" website, dispensing advice on career, job search, and management issues. Previously she was the chief of staff for a national nonprofit lobbying organization, where she was responsible for day-to-day management. She lives in Washington, D.C.